“I demand a rematch!”, I said to Bob Hurst. He had just whomped me in a medieval game… my own rules, of course… and I thought I deserved a second chance. We each had commanded three forces, termed retinues, with each retinue containing troop types such as mounted knights and foot knights and men at arms and archers. And Bob had wiped out my entire force… cleaned my clock, so to speak. The retinues were each commanded by a knightly knight, i.e., a leading knight, and we kept a record of the Efficiency Levels (EL) of each knight. Depending upon a dice throw, the knights started out at an EL of either 70 or 65 or 60. Each time a casualty was inflicted upon any of the knight’s units, his EL was reduced by 3 points. And when his EL went down to zero, the knight simply said “I’ve had enough!”, and he took his retinue and went home. In essence, the EL could be said to represent not the actual number of casualties taken by the retinue, but the attitude of the knight himself, who, seeing his men bashed time and time again, finally withdrew his force from the battle. Combat The combat procedures were patterned after the firing procedures in a set of rules I had downloaded from the internet, a rules-set written by a British fella (whose name I don’t remember), and whose rules were called “Full Metal Jacket Potato”, purportedly written for the war in Vietnam. This set had one procedure for firing and another for hand-to-hand combat. I fashioned the medieval rules so that both the firing and the hand-to-hand combat systems used the same procedures. As an example, look at Bob’s archers firing upon my footknights. The bows of the archers have an impact value of 16. Each unit of archers had 2 stands, and if both stands fired, then instead of doubling the impact value, we’d add +5 for the second stand, giving a total impact value of 21. Now we look at the defense value of the target… here, the footknights… which turned out to be 9. Subtract the defense value from the impact value and you get 21-9, or a net of 12, which could be considered to be a sort of penetration number. For the first strike, toss a 10-sided die, and subtract the toss from the net of 12. If, say, a 4 was tossed, then 12-4 is 8 points remaining, and we’ve whittled away at the penetration. Another 10-sider is tossed for the second strike… say a 6. Subtract the 6 from the remaining net of 8 to get a value of 2 remaining for the penetration. And yet another toss… let’s say it was a 7. Since 7 is greater than the remaining penetration value of 2, the third strike is unsuccessful, and the combat is over. The archers have had 2 successful strikes, and each strike will produce an impact, not directly upon the footknights, but upon the knight who leads the foot knights, the man in charge of the retinue. His Efficiency Level (EL) is reduced by 3 for every successful strike and so here he loses 6 EL. Note that as the penetration value is gradually reduced by each die toss, a series of very low 10-sider tosses (perhaps 1s and 2s) within a single archer volley could produce a horrific effect upon the EL of the knight. But what is the actual effect upon the targeted footknights… the guys at whom the arrows were aimed? The impact effect on them is to have them take a morale test. The base Morale Level (ML) for all units within a knight’s retinue was defined to be 70 percent less the EL points just lost. In the above example, with a base level of 70, then the 2 hits, of 3 each, knocked the ML down to an ML of 64. A percentage dice toss of 64 or below indicated a successful result. An unsuccessful toss above 64 and the knight himself lost yet another 3 EL points, while his foot knights would fall back. In the above manner, Bob reduced all my ELs to zero, wiped out all my retinues, and won the first battle. The EL points of his own knights, while not too high in themselves, were, at least, not zero. We began the second battle, and at first, I thought I had a good thing going for me. One of Bob’s three knights, the Earl of Gonn, took his retinue and took a roundabout way around the town of Kerreton, temporarily taking his men out of the battle. This permitted me to mass three retinues on two, and I hoped to concentrate, in particular, two of my retinues on that of Bob’s most illustrious leader, Sir Robert of Hurst. Sequence The sequence was card driven… there was a single deck, in which each of our three knights had 2 cards for his retinue, giving a total of 12 cards. In addition, I placed another 3 cards per side in the deck annotated “fire”. This produced an 18 card deck. When a knight’s card was drawn, his entire retinue moved (10 inches) and his archers could fire (bow range was 15 inches). When one of our “fire” cards was drawn, all the archers on a side could fire. Note that this particular configuration, using a single deck from which both sides draw, gives the typical “lurchy” sequence. As the cards are drawn, first one retinue lunges forward, then the next retinue lunges, and then the next… and so on. For our one-on-one game, this was not too bad, since one or the other of us was continuously kept busy and doing something … for a multiple-player game, this would have been the pits. Lurchy or not, the card draws didn’t help me at all. I couldn’t concentrate my troops sufficiently to smash away at the enemy, and the upshot was that Bob eliminated 2 of my 3 retinues (reducing their EL points to zero) while I eliminated 2 of his. This left my one remaining knight, Sir Romm, to face the Earl of Gonn as he rounded the town of Kerreton. A one-on-one battle, which was not what I wanted. As I remember, our mounted knights charged out in one final, glorious battle. Looking at my troops, the impact value of my mounted knights was 20… add to this a +5 for a second stand, and you get a final value of 25. Subtract the opposing mounted knight’s defensive value of 10 to get a resultant penetration of 15. Now it’s my turn to toss 10-siders, trying to get as many tosses as possible before I finally reduce the penetration of 15 to zero, since each successful toss reduced his EL by 3. And while I was going through my die rolls, Bob was going through his. Ah, well… some things are not to be… once again my forces left the field. Back to PW Review November 2001 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com